Chapter XXV: New Enterprises and New Theories

As we have seen, Park’s second expedition was fruitful in nothing but disaster, and the legacy of experience that helps others to success.

The journal Isaaco brought back from the Niger did not add anything to our knowledge of the river, and so little did Amadi Fatuma’s narrative supplement it as to the results of the voyage down the stream to Bussa, that in the map attached to the published journal and biographical notice in 1816, Park’s furthest point is placed only some eighty miles to the E.S.E. of Timbuktu, instead of nearly 700 miles in a straight line S.E.

There was one geographer, however, more far-seeing than the others, who, though at the time unheeded, struck upon the real solution of the problem of the Niger’s termination. This was M. Richard, a German, who published his views on the subject in the “Ephemerides Geographique” as far back as 1808. These, briefly stated, were as follows. The Niger, after reaching Wangara, takes a direction towards the south, and being joined by other rivers from that part of Africa, makes a great turn thence towards the south-west, pursuing its course till it approaches the north-eastern extremity of the Gulf of Guinea, where it divides and discharges itself by different channels into the Atlantic, after having formed an immense delta, of which the Rio del Rey constitutes the eastern, and the Rio Formosa or Benin the western branch.

Never was a better instance of a mental discovery of a geographical fact. Richard’s hypothesis is a graphic description of the actual geography of the middle and lower Niger. This of course was not to be recognised by the world, before whose eyes the Kong Mountains ever loomed up as an impassable barrier running across the suggested line of drainage. Till these could be removed, turned aside, or broken up, no geographer was prepared to allow that the Niger could possibly discharge itself into the Gulf of Guinea.

Mungo Park had left one legacy of theory behind him, viz., that the Niger and the Congo were one. What was known of his last voyage in nowise helped to disabuse men of that idea--on the contrary, it obtained more widely than ever.

To set at rest once for all this important question, the Government, undeterred by the disastrous termination of the last expedition, determined to fit out another on an even larger scale, and in spite of the dire fate which had befallen Park and his companions, there were not wanting plenty of ardent spirits to risk all the dangers of a similar enterprise.

To ensure success the expedition was divided into two parts--one to follow Park’s route more or less closely and descend the Niger; the other to ascend the Congo, haply to meet half way, if the fates were propitious.

Captain Tuckey was the leader of the Congo section; and along with him went a botanist, a geologist, a naturalist, a comparative anatomist, a gentleman volunteer, and fifty of a crew.

The party left England on the 16th February 1816, and reached the mouth of the Congo in five months and a half. The impression they received on entering the river was one of disappointment, the river appearing as one of second class magnitude instead of the gigantic stream they had been taught to expect.

In vain, too, did they look for traces of the great kingdoms described by the early Portuguese explorers, or of the churches and cities founded by the Europeans in the early days of Portuguese national and Christian enterprise. For the most part they were met only by the dark depths of malarious mangrove swamps, and the profound stillness and impenetrable vegetation of the tropical forest, though here and there in the clearings were miserable villages, inhabited by idle, good-humoured natives, with a decided appetite for ardent spirits--seemingly the only legacy permanently left behind by the Europeans.

Pushing up the river, they at length reached the first cataracts of the Congo, which, instead of proving to be another Niagara, seemed to their jaundiced eyes “a comparative brook bubbling over its stony bed”--a description, needless to say, not confirmed by subsequent expeditions.

Unable to proceed further in their boats, Tuckey and his companions continued the exploration by land, and in spite of the extreme difficulties they had to encounter in cutting their way through pathless forests without a guide, they surmounted the first stretch of falls, and reached a point where the river widened and presented no difficulties to navigation. Unhappily, however, the old story of disease commenced. Three of the principal men had successively to return to the ship; and finally Tuckey and his companion Smith, the botanist, abandoned their projects, seeing their further progress hopeless in face of so many difficulties and their own helpless condition under the paralysing influence of disease. They reached the ship to find their three companions dead. Smith was the next victim. Finally, overcome by depression and mental anxiety, Captain Tuckey died also. How many sailors succumbed we are not told.

Meanwhile no better luck fell to the lot of the other section of the expedition.

On the 14th December, this party, consisting of 100 men and 200 animals, under the command of Major Peddie, landed at the mouth of the Rio Nunez, nearly midway between the Gambia and Sierra Leone. Major Peddie’s intention was to pass across the narrow part between the Ocean and the Niger. Hardly had he landed, however, before the fell demon of disease, which in its foul lair keeps watch and ward over the fair expanse of Inner Africa, laid its invisible hand upon him, and ere the march was begun he found a grave in the land he had come to explore.

Under Captain Campbell the expedition experienced only a succession of disasters. The donkeys rapidly perished under the hands of men unaccustomed to look after them. Food was only to be obtained with the utmost difficulty, and at ruinous prices.

Arrived near the frontiers of the Fulah country, they were detained for four months owing to the suspicions entertained towards them by the king and his people.

Everything they had began to melt away at an alarming rate. Soon not a beast of burden was left, and when, seeing advance hopeless, they turned seawards, their retreat became one continued story of plunder. Kumner, the naturalist, died _en route_, and Campbell only reached Kakunda to add his name to the list of victims to African exploration. The final stroke was given to the unlucky fortunes of this evidently ill-conducted enterprise by the death of Lieutenant Stoker, a young naval officer who assumed command, and was about to make a new attempt to penetrate the country.

Clearly African exploration was no light matter, requiring the making of wills and the setting of earthly affairs in order for such as put their hand to the work. Yet strangely enough there was no halting--no dearth of volunteers. When one died, another was ready to take his place.

“Each stepping where his comrade stood
The instant that he fell.”

In this spirit Captain Gray, a survivor of Peddie’s party, made an attempt to follow Park’s track, but got no further than Bondou, from which, after being detained for nearly a year, he managed to return to the coast.

But what all these various disastrous attempts were unable to achieve was meanwhile being once more accomplished by a stay-at-home geographer, James M‘Queen. The circumstances under which he was attracted to the subject are in harmony with the romantic character of African history. A copy of the narrative of Park’s first expedition found its way into the hands of M‘Queen while resident in the Island of Grenada, West Indies. Among the negroes under his charge were several Mandingoes from the banks of the Niger. One Haussa negro he came in contact with had actually rowed Park across the Niger.

Already imbued with pronounced geographical tastes, M‘Queen’s imagination was at once taken captive by the mystery of the Great River. With all the enthusiasm of an ardent temperament, he devoted himself to the solution of the question as thoroughly as Park himself, though in a very different manner. While, one after another, explorers toiled and struggled, sickened and died, with but small result to science, he set about collecting information from all the negroes and freemen he met who had come from or even set foot in West Africa. More especially did he study all the available materials supplied by Arabs who had travelled and traded in the Sudan, or by Europeans and natives who, bent on commerce or discovery, had penetrated to the interior from the West Coast.

With extraordinary genius and industry, and admirable clear-sightedness and judgment, he set in their true light and pieced together the various items thus collected relating to the course of the Niger, till he succeeded in mapping out for himself the broad geographical features of the whole region through which it runs. As far back as 1816 the first sketch of his views was given to the world in a small treatise, in which he pointed out, as had Richard before him, that the Niger certainly entered the ocean in the Bight of Benin. The treatise fell unheeded, however--at least by the world at large; but undiscouraged, M‘Queen continued his researches for five years more, and in 1821 produced a book, “Containing a Particular Account of the Course and Termination of the Great River Niger in the Atlantic Ocean.”

In this interesting work M‘Queen reviews all the various theories respecting the Niger. He demolishes Rennell’s opinion that it disappeared in some central wastes of sand, or becomes evaporated in a series of swamps under the burning heats of a tropical sun. The view that it flows east and joins the Nile met a similar fate before his army of facts. The obstructing Kong barrier was cleft asunder with a Titan’s strength, and made to separate instead of join the Congo and the Niger.

But the writer was not merely destructive. He could build as well. With the very weapons with which he pulled down the theories of the past, he set about constructing a theory of his own. Laying together fact upon fact, gathered from every available source, he traced the course of the Niger in a southerly direction. Bussa, from being left near Timbuktu, he transported several hundred miles further south. From the kingdom of Bornu and adjacent states he gathered together the various drainage streams, and ran them into a common channel--the Gir or Nile of the Sudan; but instead of directing it to the true Nile, as had formerly been the case when it was believed to be the Niger itself, he gave it a westerly course south of the Haussa States and Nyffé (Nupé) to its junction with the Kwora or Main Niger. Here the Arab writers and traders failed him, though leaving him without a doubt as to the ultimate destination of the Central Sudanese waters.

For the termination, however, he had to seek information from the Atlantic side. Everything pointed to the Bight of Benin as the only possible place of discharge of such a huge river. Here was found an unknown extent of low flat country and fetid mangrove swamp, pierced by many-branched anastomosing creeks. From Calabar to Benin canoes could pass in all directions by means of these creeks, and it was known that they extended far into the interior. Though subject to the ebb and flow of the tide, there was no question as to the volume of fresh water which moved seaward, bearing floating islands on its discoloured floods.

Supported by a convincing array of facts such as these, M‘Queen could come to no other conclusion but that “in the Bights of Benin and Biafra, therefore, is the great outlet of the Niger, bearing along in his majestic stream all the waters of Central Africa from 10° west longitude to 28° east longitude, and from the Tropic of Cancer to the shores of Benin.”

Never was a piece of arm-chair geography worked out more admirably. In its broad outlines it was perfectly correct. To M‘Queen it was as much a certainty as if he had actually explored and mapped it on the spot.

Imbued with this faith, he proceeded to point out the importance of the Niger to the commerce of England and the future of Africa. With Fernando Po and the Niger in the hands of his countrymen, he saw Britain mistress of the fate of the continent. Bussa was to be the inner key of the situation. “Therefore,” he says, “on this commanding spot let the British standard be firmly planted, and no power on earth could tear it up.... Firmly planted in Central Africa, the British flag would become the rallying point of all that is honourable, useful, beneficial, just, and good. Under the mighty shade thereof the nations would seek security, comfort, and repose. Allies Great Britain would find in abundance. They would flock to her settlement, if it had the power and the means to protect them. The resources of Africa, and the energies of Africa, under a wise and vigorous policy, may be made to subdue and control Africa. Let Britain only form such a settlement, and give it that countenance, support, and protection which the wisdom and energy of British councils can give, and which the power and resources of the British empire can so well maintain, and Central Africa to future ages will remain a grateful and obedient dependency of this empire. The latter will become the centre of all the wealth, and the focus of all the industry, of the former. Thus the Niger, like the Ganges, would acknowledge Great Britain as its protector, our king as its lord.... A city built there under the protecting wings of Great Britain, and extended, enriched, and embellished by the industry, skill, and spirit of her sons, would ere long become the capital of Africa. Fifty millions of people, yea, even a greater number, would be dependent on it.”

These are brave words, truly, about what after all was merely a “mental discovery,” and taken alone, they might only evoke a smile, if we did not know that they are those of a man of no ordinary genius and power of insight. Looking back seventy years after he wrote, we can see how truly prophetic he was in most that he wrote, and that he was no more the blatant patriot than the geographical dreamer. His genius for looking ahead was as great as for looking around. Take, for instance, his warning of the danger of a French advance from the Senegal to the Niger, and its far-reaching consequence, if carried out, to our commercial and political position in West Central Africa. He it was who foresaw nearly seventy years before its accomplishment the necessity of a Chartered Company to take full advantage of our (then prospective) position on the Niger, and the results that would ensue without such a method of developing the resources of that region. Of these matters, however, we shall treat in their proper place. Enough for the moment if we show how thoroughly M‘Queen had made himself master of the geographical problems then before the public, as well as of the political and commercial situation that was to follow the opening up of the Niger to European intercourse. Only now, after more than half a century of gross and irreparable mismanagement in West Africa, we are waking up to the wisdom of his views, and striving in some measure to carry them into effect.